


Bad Habits

by tinsnip



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Cheating, Cigarettes, Gen, Quitting, Smoking, and playing fair, worldly pleasures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-07 03:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18612466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinsnip/pseuds/tinsnip
Summary: Clearly, both Crowley and Aziraphale used to smoke. We know this. We’ve been told this by Mr. Gaiman.I’d be very surprised if either of them still does. But the reasons for this, and the methods by which their statuses changed, are different.Notably: Crowley cheats. Aziraphale doesn't.





	Bad Habits

Crowley is cool. And smoking was  _cool._

But cool has a way of redefining itself.

Crowley’d seen early on which way the wind was blowing. In the eighties, everybody’d smoked. In the nineties, a lot of people smoked. By the two-thousands, smoking was starting to become something that mostly old people did. The cigarette packages all had rotten gums on them, or dark hints about erectile dysfunction. Neither of those things was particularly relevant to Crowley, but still: smoking just wasn’t _cool_ anymore.

Crowley is, always and forever, cool. (Or, at least, would really like people to think he is.)

One day he’d been walking through a city on a lovely, sunny day, enjoying a cigarette, and everyone who’d looked at him had made a slight, unconscious grimace of displeasure. Some had even stepped a bit further away from him to get away from the smoke.

And that had been that for that. Crowley doesn’t particularly want humans hanging all over him, but he doesn’t like being repulsive either. He leaves that for others in the Lowerarchy. 1 Crowley just wants to be... Crowley.

He hasn’t touched a cigarette since. That day, that afternoon, he just... stopped. And he never really thought about it again.

Because he’d never bothered to get properly addicted in the first place.

Crowley is, always and forever, a cheat.

 

Aziraphale is _not_ a cheat.

He buys his clothing from proper shops, and takes care of it. (To a point.) Sometimes he even does laundry. Simply miracling up new togs every day the way Crowley does would, he feels, be cheating.

He owns a bookshop purely as an excuse to hoard books, and because it’s a bookshop, he occasionally sells some of them, causing him great displeasure and wringing of hands. _Not_ to sell any books would be cheating.

When he eats, he doesn’t snap his fingers and cause an anchovy pizza to appear. Instead, he goes to a restaurant where the food is properly prepared. He waits patiently for the cook to do mysterious things in the kitchen, and eats with evident pleasure, and pays the bill afterwards with real money. (Or at least a real charge card. White, with a gold logo: CELESTIAL BANKS. No limit on it, which is nice.)

And when he’d smoked, _oh,_ the days when he’d smoked, he’d chosen the cigarettes with care. He’d had a favourite brand. He’d kept packs about the store. He’d lit them with lucifers, struck on a matchbox then puffed out carefully to avoid starting a fire. He’d smoked while he walked, or while he sat, or while he read (ah, while he read!), and there’d been little ashtrays all over the shop that emptied themselves unobtrusively now and then. 2 He’d inhaled deeply, savouring the smoke, and let it fume out through his nostrils, or in a long cool stream through pursed lips. Smoking had been, for Aziraphale, a real and honest passion, not to be sullied by cigarettes that couldn’t get wet, or that never went stale or got sat on. It was a pure, worldly pleasure. And he absolutely, one hundred percent, hadn’t wanted to quit.

But the world had changed around him. It always did. One day he could puff away in peace in his own shop; the next people were wrinkling their noses when they entered and commenting just-audibly about how the books were whiffy. Whiffy!

He _had_ to sell books. At least a few. If he didn’t sell books, then by his own morality, he didn’t get to have a bookshop.

So he’d quit.

This makes it sound as if it was an easy process. But Aziraphale doesn’t cheat.

He’d stopped cold turkey, and then started again, and then tried the gum, and hated it, and had gone around sucking on little nicotine inhalers and grizzling at the world. Crowley’d laughed at him as he’d frowned and bitten his cuticles and sworn under his breath. 3

“You’re hooked.”

 _“I’m_ not hooked. It’s this _body_ that’s hooked.”

“Same difference. Why not just miracle yourself clean and sober?”

And Aziraphale had glared.

Once, Crowley had brought him an e-cigarette. “Why not try it?” he’d said. “All the humans are doing it. And it won’t smell up your shop.”

Aziraphale had sat and stared at it, later, and the little pack of cartridges that had come with it, and then had thrown them both in the trash and poured old coffee grounds on top of them. It wouldn’t be the same. It would have satisfied the urge, yes, but it wouldn’t be the _same._

He doesn’t smoke anymore. He does, sometimes, suck sherbet lemons. He bites his nails, or he did until he started having them manicured. And he fidgets a bit more than he used to.

Sometimes he goes as long as a few days without wanting a cigarette. He hopes that, over the years, it may stretch out to as long as a week or two. And he empathizes more with humans now, a little; with the ones who do stupid things because they can’t fathom a time when they’ll stop wanting what their bodies tell them desperately they’ll always want. He knows how hard it is for them. They can’t cheat, either. 

 

* * *

 

1 C. S. Lewis, this one belongs to you and Uncle Screwtape.

2 All right, perhaps he cheats a bit. Wouldn’t you?

3 Aziraphale doesn’t swear, either. And if you don’t say it out loud, you haven’t really sworn.


End file.
